Kieran Donaghy

I can’t believe more than three months have passed since I published the last interview (with Luke Meddings). Shame on you if you haven’t watched that yet!

Do you like using videos in the classroom? What do you do with them? Have you heard about the website Film English? Whether you have or you haven’t, here’s the interview I did with Kieran Donaghy, author of the aforementioned award-winning site. Find out what drives someone like him to produce free lesson plans, visit his site, and if you have any questions or opinions, please do write in the comments section. I’m sure Kieran will be only too pleased to answer them.

If you’ve got the bandwidth to spare, you can watch it in glorious HD! To watch in HD, click on play. You’ll then see two extra icons appearing on the bottom right of the screen. Click on the wheel icon, second from left, choose 720p. Enjoy!

Bio

Kieran Donaghy has taught in the UK, Italy, Portugal and Spain. He is a teacher and teacher trainer at UAB Idiomes Barcelona part of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He has Master’s degrees in TEFL, and Business Communication.

He is particularly interested in the use of film in the classroom. He is the co-author of Cineliteracy, 10 Films for Health Professionals. He has a blog on the use of film FILM ENGLISH which has won numerous awards including Best Individual Blog in the 2011 Edublog Awards.

He has given presentations on film at national and international conferences.

At last!! I’ve been hoping for this one for more than a year and it certainly delivers.

Great blog, great bloke and great interview. What I think makes the blog is the shorts. Claudio Azevedo does a great job selecting movie clips on his blog but Kieran has a great way of sourcing films few people have seen. They also have their own style and are always interesting. I think it’s good publicity for the film-makers too.

Loved listening to the two of you chat! Kieran, it really must be a labour of love, as I know how long it takes to find just the right video clip, and then devise ways of using it to develop language learning. Chiew, you ask just the right questions of your subjects, which makes the interview such a good watch. Thanks both for doing this!

Thanks a lot, Marie. You’re right, it does take a long time finding just the right clip or short film, but after watching so many I’ve now got a sort of sixth sense for whether a clip or film will work or not. Once I’ve got a short film I know will work, the activities seem to come quite spontaneously. Cheers, Kieran

Great interview Chiew. Really enjoyed it. I’m always fascinated listening to anyone who simply loves what they do. Kieran certainly seems to have a real passion for his work. I’ll be honest, I hadn’t visited his site before watching this, and I’m now wondering how I missed it. It’s very impressive and I’ll be following it from now on.

Thanks for the comment, Barry. Much appreciated. Yes, Kieran is a fine example of teachers willing to put their own time into something they believe in. How does he find the time, having a wife & two young daughters? And yet there are teachers complaining they haven’t got time to be involved in CPD…

Wow! Chiew – such big thanks for having this interview! Fascinating to listen to (you know I enjoy listening to these interviews!!!) and WHAT A BLOG! How have I missed it? Spent half an hour browsing there already (though there is a film in which they say “read more and browse less, LOL!).
Now off to write Kieran – the site wouldn’t let me subscribe (keeps asking if I’m sure I want to do that! Yes, I’m sure).
I learn a lot from these interviews!
Naomi

There you go – you learn something new every day!🙂 And you should browse http://chiewpang.blogspot.com/ often too – you don’t know what else you might learn! Thanks for the comment, Naomi – much appreciated.

Hi, Chiew! Thanks for featuring Kieran. I’m a fan of his website Film English. It’s good to learn more about the man. It’s also cool that you’re featuring the video specifications that you’ve used. Great interview!

I have just started teaching this month, and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I went through all the posts on film-english.com….amazing work! In my first week, I already used two of Kieran’s ideas and I am now trying to access the blog, but there seems to be an issue. I keep getting the following error message: error establishing database connection.

Do you have any idea of what is going on? I really hope this issue is fixed soon… I am looking forward to trying some of the other ideas on this amazing blog!